Monday, June 10, 2024

Light day today, slowed down by some items I needed to take care of in order to be properly enrolled in my Ph.D. program.

I did the following:

• Examine reviews provided for conference submissions for some of the lab’s papers
• Brainstorm points for improvement
• Email Sameer with thoughts on CAPTCHA paper

Tuesday, June 11, 2024

Mostly brainstorming today. Still working out what exactly I want to do for the summer, although it’s seeming like I will probably work on the large-scale phishing analysis.

My progress today:

• Toy with email samples
• Convert emails to .txt format for further inspection
• Thorough brainstorm to identify potential research questions
• Creation of slide deck to present at the lab meeting tomorrow

Wednesday, June 12, 2024

Very productive day today! Unfortunately, it turns out that my project idea may not be set in stone. I ended up finding some interesting tools that may significantly simplify the process of parsing our emails; if they are applicable, I will continue working on the phishing analysis. If I am unable to find a worthwhile system, I will transition to the CAPTCHA work Sameer has suggested given that I don’t want to spend the entire summer coding up a silly parsing tool.

My contributions for the day:

• Meet (briefly) with Sameer about my project ideas/status
• Attend the weekly lab meeting
  • Present my ideas on the phishing analysis
  • Get feedback on current plan of action
  • Share presentation with colleague
• Lit search (multifaceted)
  • To understand the state of the art
  • To identify an existing candidate system to parse emails & consequently facilitate scalable analysis

Thursday, June 13, 2024

Mostly just dug through a bunch of papers today. Seems like there’s a lot of NLP applications on email analysis (no surprise).

Progress:

• More time on the lit search
  • Found a paper that introduces a potentially adaptable framework
    • Toyed around with the framework

Friday, June 14, 2024

Progress:

• Think of questions for Sameer about his CAPTCHA idea
• Brainstormed pros & cons of each project idea
• Wrote up weekly update for the lab

Week 3 Summary

Bit of a hesitant week, as I’ve been mulling over the two main project ideas that would be useful for Sameer’s research agenda. I’m still unsure of what exactly I want to do, so I’ll meet with him on Monday to nail that down. All that said, I did make some substantial strides for the phishing project in terms of a skeleton outline for necessary tasks and possible directions.